Governing the City State - Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate ...

The Role of the CentreCentral agencies play an important, contested, and sometimes controversial role in publicservices around the world. In the Review’s preferred model, the central agency role would bedischarged by the Policy Division and Finance Directorate of the proposed Chief Minister’sDepartment, and in other options canvassed by the Chief Minister’s and Finance Directorates.It is with these alternatives in mind that “central agency” is used in the remainder of thisReport.Generically, central agencies comprise departments supporting heads of governments (andgovernments’ collective decision making processes), departments overseeing revenue, macroand micro economic and fiscal policy, and departments responsible for maintenance offinancial accounts, scrutinising and quality assuring estimates of future expenditures and newspending proposals. These latter two functions in the Commonwealth Government contextfall to the Treasury and the Department of Finance and Deregulation respectively. In theACT, in keeping with its state government counterparts, these roles are currently combined inthe Department of Treasury.One Submission to the Review noted in this context:there appears to be no significant sense of overall co-ordination and direction withinthe ACT administration. The perception is of a lack of any significant co-ordinationor leadership emanating from the Chief Minister’s department which should be coordinatingall levels of government to achieve clearly defined government policy.This is especially apparent between agencies responsible for land sales, their control,planning and development guidelines and financial planning in terms of revenue andits planning.Bureaucratic leadership starts at the top so that the chief executive of the ChiefMinister’s department should be the lead bureaucrat who shows strong leadership inco-ordinating the relevant departments and agencies so that they are working inharmony and in a co-ordinated fashion achieving defined government policy.Many of the issues that are presented to Cabinet should be headed off at the pass anddealt with by the senior bureaucrats through the control of the Chief Executive of theChief Minister’s Department.Responsibility for successful coordination of policy development and implementation in theACT Government ultimately lies, as it does in the Commonwealth Government, with thehead of government, and the Cabinet, supported by the Cabinet process, and the legislationprogram, for which first minister’s departments have particular responsibilities. 148 In recent148 Keating, M. (1995) ‘The Evolving Role Of Central Agencies: Change And Continuity’. Australian Journal of PublicAdministration. 54(4) pp.579-583, p.579.Governing the City State: 95